N=1 is a great thing. It is what should be driving our own personal diets. Instead, we have "my n=1 is great for me, so it must be great for everyone!"

Yeah.

Doesn't it make you miss the days when the "my food is better than yours" was fought between Paleo and Vegans and not within it's own circles? Blimey, this is starting to sound like some kind of fantasy/sci-if thriller. :P

Everyone burns fat for energy at all times. If you are not burning fat, you are dead.

Originally Posted by oxide

carbs under 150g

Wrong.

Originally Posted by oxide

and the idea that calories are secondary to macros (see carbs under 150 grams).

Wrong.

Originally Posted by oxide

Your posts have said several times that it doesn't matter what you eat if your calories are under some number.

Wrong. I have never said that, and you will never find that quote anyway. Calories matter for weight. If weight is your sole reason for dieting, I feel sorry for you.

Originally Posted by oxide

Your posts consistently advocate plenty of starches. You must be over 150g.

I advocate everyone try eating all real foods and see how they feel eating all types of food. I eat lots of starch because it is a vastly superior energy source for my lifestyle and I feel much better regularly eating fruit and starch. How exactly is this not primal?

Originally Posted by oxide

....This is not Primal. This is on the insidious weight gain part of the Carbohydrate curve.

You clearly have not read the book. Primal has absolutely nothing to do with carb count. Primal/Paleo isn't about what TO eat. It is about what NOT to eat.

Originally Posted by oxide

I guess you work off all those extra by exercising.
....This is not Primal. You're supposed to be burning fat, not carbs.

You lack a fundamental understanding of how a person's metabolism works.

T

Originally Posted by oxide

he first page of your vaunted recipe from May 2011 thread uses coconut flour, almond meal, rice flour, and flax seed to make breads and pizza crust.
....What was that about not using nuts for CW substitutes?

I was trying to hard to eat low carb. No wonder I didn't have any luck for the first 4 months.

Originally Posted by oxide

In May 2011 you suggested making a cheesecake high starch and low-fat by using dried fruit, rice, and tapioca starch.
....Low fat is NOT primal. And where are the Real Food police when you need them? How can you call extracted starch from tapioca "whole and unprocessed?"

Funny, a while back, choco told me I should be eating my carbs WITHOUT fat. In fact, he recommended boiled chicken breast with fat and skin removed, and plain white rice. Mmmm...

That would strongly depend on the situation. If you are trying to gain lean muscle mass without putting on much fat, a great meal would be overeating chicken breast and white rice after a heavy weight training session. I've never eaten boiled chicken and plain white rice in my life, though. 96% ground beef and white potatoes would be a much tastier, more nutritious choice. My go to meal is usually steak and baked sweet potato fries after a workout.

Originally Posted by Drumroll

That just sounds so appetizing. He said it had something to do with fat messing up satiety signals from carbs which would definitely go against what you just said which was we should include plenty of fat with our carbs.

No, I didn't say that. What you said makes no sense.

Originally Posted by Drumroll

At least get your message to be consistent, ya know?

I think your message is simply to troll.

Eating fat with a small quantity of starch is sometimes a good way to introduce small amounts of starch to a person that hasn't had any in awhile since the fat mitigates the blood sugar response. It is also advisable for someone with blood sugar control issues that wants something starchy. For someone looking to overeat and gain lean muscle mass while minimizing fat gain after a heavy weight training session, it is advised to keep fat as low as possible because carbs are not directly stored as fat on your body (unlike dietary fat) and while overeating the same calories worth of fat and protein post-workout as carbs and protein will yield the same amount of weight gain, the protein/carbs meal should give you a better lean muscle:fat mass ratio.

Last edited by ChocoTaco369; 01-21-2013 at 07:31 PM.

Don't put your trust in anyone on this forum, including me. You are the key to your own success.

Aaah, the carb wars.
Choco Taco, I like reading your posts. I find them informative and eloquently written and put together, altho at times patronizing. However, imo your nutritional paradigm doesn't sound compatible with the Primal one as I percieve it. To me it's much more in line with CW, customized for a person with Celiac.
Personally, after I lost most of my extra weight eating at VLC level I have moved on to eating more of the right for me kind of carbs and have currently settled to 100 -120g daily. This is what works best for me and my own body and mind.
Shouldn't this lifestyle be about figuring all that stuff for ourselves?
IMO the Primal Blueprint is lower carb, compared to CW diet and the government made up food pyramid/plate. Is a low- carb woe by default.

The original mistake of the Primal Blueprint was including a carbohydrate curve. That is the PB's biggest downfall. The actual focus is simply eating real food. That is the most important thing, and it's why you see the paleo community sprinting away from carbohydrate restriction as fast as they can. Similar to CW's demonization of fats, the paleo community is quickly realizing its mistake with carbs. Sisson is no different since he has almost entirely abandoned the insulin-fat theory and carb counts (that he wrote about 2+ years ago) and now focuses more on calories. That's the best part about Mark - he actually changes instead of adhering to the same paradigm to save face. He's a humble man.

Don't put your trust in anyone on this forum, including me. You are the key to your own success.

The original mistake of the Primal Blueprint was including a carbohydrate curve. That is the PB's biggest downfall. The actual focus is simply eating real food. That is the most important thing, and it's why you see the paleo community sprinting away from carbohydrate restriction as fast as they can. Similar to CW's demonization of fats, the paleo community is quickly realizing its mistake with carbs. Sisson is no different since he has almost entirely abandoned the insulin-fat theory and carb counts (that he wrote about 2+ years ago) and now focuses more on calories. That's the best part about Mark - he actually changes instead of adhering to the same paradigm to save face. He's a humble man.

Mark generally recommends you meter your carbohydrate intake, but it's solely because he believes fat and protein will better satiate you, causing you to eat less calories. That's the point of his Carbohydrate Curve - he feels you should eat that way for satiety, not for magic metabolic reasons. The problem is as you lose more and more weight, the whole 9 calories per gram of fat thing becomes an issue. It becomes much easier to overdo fat than carbohydrate since an increased serving of fatty things translates into a bigger calorie load than a similar volumetric increase in carby things. Pair with that your leptin levels fall as body fat mass drops and your thyroid tends to slow with decreased carbohydrate and calorie intake, it becomes often more and more advantageous to displace more fat for carbohydrate as you get leaner and leaner. Also, factor in leaner bodies tend to enjoy moving around a lot more than larger bodies and you have all the more reason to shift calories.

You also have to realize the Primal Blueprint is written for a very overweight person that eats a standard American diet. "Carbs" to them are cake, cookies and pasta. These things are very calorically dense and simple to overeat. Any one of us can pack away 1,000 calories of cookies in a sitting without batting an eye. Try doing that with potatoes, though. They're high nutrient, low calorie foods that are very filling and difficult to overeat, providing you're not covering them in cheese, bacon and all kinds of goodies and increasing food reward too much.

I really buy into Stephan Guyenet's theories on food reward. He's pretty brilliant. This is phenomenal as well.

He doesn't explicitly state he doesn't believe in the insulin hypothesis anymore (he probably still does), but he very rarely mentions insulin outside the context of insulin resistance. He even begrudgingly admitted here that de novo lipogenesis only occurs when glycogen stores are topped off; in other words, it contributes very little to fat stores if you're active, which most of us are.

Not to mention most people here eat very little in the way of glucose on top of their activity, so if you think that 151st carbohydrate led to your weight stall... yeah, bullshit.

He doesn't explicitly state he doesn't believe in the insulin hypothesis anymore (he probably still does), but he very rarely mentions insulin outside the context of insulin resistance. He even begrudgingly admitted here that de novo lipogenesis only occurs when glycogen stores are topped off; in other words, it contributes very little to fat stores if you're active, which most of us are.

Not to mention most people here eat very little in the way of glucose on top of their activity, so if you think that 151st carbohydrate led to your weight stall... yeah, bullshit.

Mark is still a bit of a carbophobe for sure, but he's slowly changing his tune. I will defend the guy because he actually regularly changes his opinion and he is a very nice, humble guy IMO. But he's one of the slower people in the community to change his tune. Guys like Chris Kresser, Stephan Guyenet and Robb Wolf are really leading the pro-carbohydrate charge, and it's a beautiful thing. But these guys are also a lot younger than Mark, so you'd expect them to be more open to change. Mark still pretty much is the reason behind this lifestyle taking off as he's reached the most people by far (and IMO has a much better eating plan than the original iterations of "paleo"), so the man deserves all the credit in the world. I'd still be a mess without him.

Got it? All three situations make you fat, just through different mechanisms. Fat is directly stored and carbs and protein cause you to store the fat you’re eating by decreasing fat oxidation.

The Obvious Question: Why Not Just Eat Zero Dietary Fat?

And now I’ll answer the question that I know every person who has read (and hopefully understood) the above is asking: so if carbs and protein are rarely converted to and stored as fat, and make you fat by decreasing fat oxidation and causing all ingested dietary fat to get stored as fat, can’t I eat as much as I want of protein and carbs so long as my dietary fat intake is zero?

And the asnswer is still no. Remember how I teased you above with one other exception, when carbs are converted to fat for storage? That exception is when dietary fat is below about 10% of total daily calories. Under that condition, the body ramps up de novo lipogenesis. So you still get fat.

Carbohydrate is very rarely stored as body fat. But the fact remains - it all comes down to calories. You either undereat your TDEE and lose weight or you overeat your TDEE and gain weight. Or, you could do what I try and do - undereat on sedentary days (so you lose primarily body fat while resting and preserve lean mass) and overeat after heavy weight training workouts with protein and carbs (so you primarily gain muscle and little fat).

Last edited by ChocoTaco369; 01-21-2013 at 08:02 PM.

Don't put your trust in anyone on this forum, including me. You are the key to your own success.